At first, Lulu Wang passed on working on Expats, the adaptation of Janice Y. K. Lee’s 2016 novel about a group of expatriates living in Hong Kong.

While Wang was promoting her 2019 film The Farewell, Nicole Kidman reached out to her about directing some or all of the episodes for the Amazon series she was developing as a producer and star. Expats would center on three women from other parts of the world who were all living in Hong Kong, and the devastating tragedy that connects them.

Wang quickly read the book and loved it, and she also has long been interested in Hong Kong. Wang’s family moved to the US from Beijing in 1989 at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests, and she has family and friends who moved to Hong Kong. “I saw the parallels of the political movement in Hong Kong with what had gone on when I was six years old and I had witnessed, and so I always felt connected and yet so far away,” she tells Vanity Fair.

But portraying the city itself was a particular challenge. “Hong Kong is such a culturally, politically sensitive place, and I felt a responsibility to both in some way capture the city as it is and capture some essence,” she says. “But as an outsider who’s not a Hong Konger, I also felt like, Well, what are my limitations?”

At the time, she felt that the only way for her to tell the story right was to build the adaptation from the ground up—so Wang passed. Kidman and Amazon had just been looking for a director, but Wang’s decision that she would need to be more involved tipped the scales. “She called me back like 24, 48 hours later and was like, ‘Okay, it’s yours,’” remembers Wang. “So then it was impossible to turn down.”

Wang would embark on a difficult creative journey in order to tell the story not only of the wealthy expatriates that live in Hong Kong but also of the migrants that come to the city as domestic workers. She would use the six-part limited series as a way to explore the meaning of being a mother, a woman, and an immigrant. She could explore the privilege that comes with being an expat, along with capturing Hong Kong in 2014, the year that pro-democracy protests broke out in what’s been described as a turning point for the region. And she would have to carry the weight of controversy that came with filming in Hong Kong in order to tell the story her way.

At the Toronto International Film Festival this week, Wang will debut the fifth episode of the series, the first time Expats has screened anywhere publicly. The episode, titled “Central,” is 96 minutes long, more like a short film than a TV episode, and centers on the often hidden world of domestic workers. “I was so nervous about how I was going to be able to portray Hong Kong and making sure that the bubble of the expat world was intentional, that I was examining it as opposed to just indulging in it,” Wang tells Vanity Fair in her first interview about the show. “How do you both be in that world without celebrating it, but also not judging it either?”

Lee’s 2016 novel centers on three women: Margaret, an American mother of three who is paralyzed by guilt after her youngest son disappears; Mercy, a young Korean American woman who takes the blame for the boy’s disappearance; and Hilary, Margaret’s neighbor, whose marriage is at a stalemate after her inability to bear a child. “I just thought that the novel did such an incredible job of talking about all of these different perspectives and showing how complicated a situation is. There is guilt and there is blame, but also there’s grace and there’s forgiveness,” says Wang.

Kidman, who first optioned the book through her production company Blossom Films, stars as Margaret. “She has grace towards this character of why she behaves in certain ways,” says Wang of Kidman’s portrayal. Wang cast a discovery, Ji-young Yoo, as Mercy. “The second that I saw her, I knew that she was going to be the one,” says Wang. “Mercy just carries all of this darkness and there is a lot of generational trauma in Asian American cultures, and I wanted her to have that self-deprecating darkness that even though on the outside, she might be presenting as having a good time and just another young person in their twenties.” For Hilary, Wang wanted someone who could bring some levity to the show but also thought that by casting Indian American Sarayu Blue, she could be inclusive of the large Indian population in Hong Kong that isn’t often portrayed onscreen.

But in episode five, “Central,” Wang pushes the story beyond the central three women, allowing the viewer to follow Margaret’s Filipino nanny Essie beyond the walls of Margaret’s home. Played by Ruby Ruiz, Essie is the “heart and soul” of the story, a warm caretaker who is also devastated by the disappearance of Margaret’s son. Puri, Hilary’s “helper” as the wealthy expats call them, is played by Amelyn Pardenilla, an accomplished singer in Hong Kong who is making her acting debut in Expats.

“Central” follows these women, who live at the homes of their employers, on Sunday, their day off work, as they gather in a park to reunite and gossip, an event Wang witnessed when she was in Hong Kong researching the series. “The first time I saw them, I was blown away,” she says. “Hundreds and thousands of women, and there’s such a sense of community—but they’re also there because they have nowhere else to go.”

Wang felt that capturing their world—they’re also expats, after all—was the best way to create a contrast to the lives of the privileged women at the center of the series. “In order to show that the expat world is a bubble, I had to break out of that bubble and give it context,” she says.

When Wang pitched her version of the series to Amazon, she started with the concept for the fifth episode—and she wasn’t afraid to push it to make sure Amazon was really on board with her vision. “It has to be a feature-length and it’s going to be shot differently, and I need the time and scope of an indie feature film for that episode,” she said, adding that Kidman’s character would be more or less in the background of that episode. “I think I was just trying to be a little rebellious and see how it was received, and I looked over and Nicole was like, ‘We love it. Isn’t this great?’ And the studio was like, ‘Nicole likes this? Okay, I guess we’re in.’”

Wang, who wrote the series with a writers room made up of five women, also pushed to make sure Expats would actually film in Hong Kong, despite logistical challenges. “One of the reasons I did the show was to be able to capture Hong Kong as it’s changing and just give Hong Kong more visibility in the world,” says Wang, who, along with some members of her team, spent more than 50 days in quarantine due to Hong Kong’s strict COVID restrictions (which have since been lifted).

During filming, the production took heat for focusing on a wealthy minority in Hong Kong even as political tensions in the city rise, with mainland China continuing to exert more control. “The criticism was really hurtful because I was trying to show the politics,” says Wang, who touches upon the 2014 Umbrella Revolution protests as part of the series. “The thing that was driving me was I knew that there was this political element that I felt so passionately about and that I wanted to portray.”

When the pressure got to be too much, Wang would call her mother in tears. “As much as I was afraid that I would be getting it wrong, I was also afraid of getting it right because it’s such a sensitive subject,” she says. “If you get it right, you’re also going to piss off a lot of people and so that’s something that I still carry.”

When Expats debuts in Toronto—and eventually lands on Amazon in early 2024—Wang hopes the series speaks for itself, capturing women from different walks of life and a city undergoing enormous change. She says, “Art is always political, and so my silence would also be political.”

Expats will debut its fifth episode, “Central,” at the Toronto Film Festival on September 8 and will premiere in early 2024 on Prime Video. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall-festival coverage.